Drag performers defy media censorship to publicize the Palestinian liberation struggle.
Drag performers defy media censorship to publicize the Palestinian liberation struggle.
At a recent festival at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Palestinian artist Mama Ganuush gave the impression of being up to the task in chainmail and a knitted dress. While Gaza’s museums lie beneath the rubble of Israeli bombs, cultural spaces like this in the United States have battlefields in their own way, in a war involving various factions: Zionist donors, loose-mouthed activists, and pro-Palestinian artists, to name a few.
During a hiatus in Sade’s song “Soldier of Love,” Ganuush was joined by non-binary drag king King Lotus Boy and a quartet of dancers dressed in keffiyehs. At the Feb. 1 show, they led the audience in a chant that echoed beyond the gallery walls: “Liberate Palestine!”
Since the start of Israel’s new assault on Gaza in October, Ganuush’s actions have focused primarily on one issue: the liberation of Palestine. They incorporated the colors of the Palestinian flag, projections on the walls with words like ceasefire, resistance songs and, in a moving performance, sound recordings of militarily besieged Palestine, bombs exploding through loudspeakers.
“‘Queer’ means that you radically seek the liberation of all,” Ganuush said. “That to me is queer activism. ” And similarly, “dragging in general is for me a form of protest. It’s a ‘fuck you’ through social norms. “
Our first verbal exchange was for the podcast I host, Sad Francisco, after meeting with Ganuush at a pro-Palestinian action organized through Gay Shame and Queers Undermining Israel Terrorism (QUIT) on December 2, a death that closed the busy intersection with Castro. for forty-five minutes, while a hundred queer and trans people descended on the asphalt while others moved between their bodies. outlining them with white chalk as a pavement. When we spoke, Ganuush had just returned from a walk at New York Fashion Week after Brazilian designer Victor Puglielli asked them to fly in to design a dress at the show. They walked down the runway with a cane. (they suffer from multiple sclerosis), a keffiyeh on their hips and their hands and forearms painted blood red, a look they called Palestinian punk rock.
In the 1960s, Ganuush’s father was imprisoned and tortured in Israel and Egypt because of his ties to Marxist groups and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and his family was forced to leave Gaza in 1967 to settle in Cairo, where they grew up. After graduating with engineering degrees in Egypt, they moved to the United States in 2008 to live with their sister and set up their home in San Francisco’s gay Castro district.
It was shortly after the first COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in 2020, when their city drag mom, Cassidy LeBlanc, helped them do head-to-toe makeup for a bar display in the Lower Haight community called Trax. “I never understood what frame euphoria is until I put on makeup,” they said. Honestly, that’s what drove me to flirt – the exploration of my own genre. “
Ganuush said they have long been involved in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, but their commitment intensified as they saw the genocide inflicted on Israel spread late last year. Since October, they have been active not only at the level but also behind the megaphone in protest marches. bringing together tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area.
Ganuush has had his Instagram and TikTok accounts banned, from time to time, since October; bans that many Palestinian solidarity activists know are provoked by even the most fundamental genocide-like content. To fight censorship and blacklisting, in January they launched the Collective of Heritage Artists and Liberation Activists (HALA), a network of artists who are likely to face backlash for speaking out against genocide. HALA Collective hopes to one day offer a cushion of emergency money to artists who lose their jobs or concerts due to the Palestinians.
Ganuush has managed to fill the monthly art fairs they host at Queer AF, a gallery and event space that once housed Harvey Milk’s camera shop on Castro Street. Here, they have created a space for anti-genocide activists, artists, and creators. Dragging artists, yes, but also musicians, poets, chefs and hairdressers, so that they cross paths and talk intimately, with tactics that are not possible in a demonstration.
It’s hard to gauge the importance of that kind of thing: the relationships and bonds established in a room full of other people decided us to end the genocide. When I left the last hall on March 14, the Arabic folk music of the Aswat ensemble was mixed with the music of the street clubs. I felt that everyone would go out into the world and spread the message, like all smart allies, to speak, as Ganuush hoped, “about the reality of the Palestinians to other people who don’t. “I don’t know anything about Palestine, or I haven’t heard of it. A lot of dehumanizing messages from the American establishments considered “liberal. “
While social media algorithms lock us into our own micro-niches, drag is one of the few pop culture touchstones that nearly any and all LGBTQ demographic subgroups in our frayed empire can use as a reference point. This includes conservatives, who like to wear drag. as a political tool of scaremongering, as in recent attempts to use the specter of “big and bad” hours of hoax stories to threaten investment in public libraries or criminalize abortion.
But if monoculture is dying, just ask RuPaul. The universe of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” has so far extended to a score of foreign spin-offs adding Belgium, Chile and Thailand, in addition to a total universe of after-shows and podcasts where the hosts analyze everything, even the hair of the candidates. Gay bars across the country host live streams that offer the closest thing to a sports bar for other people who hate sports. Environmentalists took note when, in a 2020 NPR interview with Terry Gross, RuPaul inadvertently revealed himself as the first prominent face of the fracking industry.
Palestine and drag were already strongly connected on Reddit and X, formerly Twitter, when a photo of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) missile with the names of drag queens who had expressed solidarity with Palestine went viral in January. At its most sensible, New York scene legend Lady Bunny.
“RuPaul does politics in the safest way possible, and maybe that’s what he’s training his servants to do. . . Stay really safe, stay really blah, blah. And then get their recommendations and donations from your influencer.
When asked about the image, she seemed perplexed: “You know, I never know what it is and what it is rarely very [artificial intelligence]. “But it is clear that whatever the origins of the photo, its author was not a fan of Bunny’s frank attitude. perspectives on politics. Long before Israel’s new assault on Gaza began in October, Bunny was distilling data for his thousands of online followers, tempering mainstream media narratives with his wit, complaint and rage.
Bunny told Truthout that she classifies herself as “probably far-left” on the political spectrum. These days, the most drag-strapped celebrities participate in RuPaul’s Drag Race, which may explain why some choose to keep quiet about the genocide, he said. “RuPaul does politics in the safest way possible, and maybe that’s what he’s training his servants to do. . . Stay really safe, stay really blah, blah. And then get their recommendations and donations from your influencer.
Despite this, the list of “Drag Race” actors who have taken a stand on Palestine is long, with several contest winners publicly signing the Queer Artists for Palestine declaration filed last December. In the statement, they denounced pinkwashing, Israel’s attempt to cover up its atrocities by giving the impression of being gay-friendly; aligned with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; and pledged to make or exhibit any painting in Israel. Fan-moderated social media accounts, such as Celebrity4palestine, Falasteen Queens, and Queens for Palestine, stick to the latest news and count followers.
Bunny and RuPaul moved from Atlanta to New York City in the 1980s and shared an apartment in the city where they temporarily became staples of nightlife and the gay world. However, their policies are out of sync. ” Ru and everyone who supports Joe Biden is center-right,” Bunny told Truthout. So if the hardest decision in drag is “creating queens in your own image, well, that’s a center-right voting user who breaks down,” Bunny said of her former roommate.
For many years, Bunny “was just a Democrat. “She volunteered her time, occasionally as a DJ, for classic gay causes. “It was as if I had received benefits for AIDS. I don’t have AIDS. I have benefited from the benefits of same-sex marriage. I never need to get married, but until then, I had just gone with the flow.
A moment of political awakening for her was watching a presidential debate in 2008 between Barack Obama, Dennis Kucinich and Hillary Clinton. Same-sex marriage has been discussed, and Clinton and Obama have said they don’t. “When Dennis looked into the camera and said, ‘Yes, I’m a gay couple and I hope you’re me,’ literally, even though I don’t care about gay marriage, I burst into tears,” she recalled. He kicked us out and none of us did. We let homosexual organizations like the [Human Rights Campaign (HRC)], which are inherently conservative, do the thinking for us, and this has to stop.
The mainstream corporate media passes the microphone to nonprofit leaders and politicians: pro-status quo voices rushing to line up to aid genocide. Today, Bunny uses her platforms to expose the hypocrisy of politicians and organizations like HRC. “I think they’ve set up a program that speaks to me in some way,” he said. The HRC, which accepts cash from arms manufacturers, is targeted by pro-Palestinian queer activists who, like Bunny and Ganuush, recognize that liberation struggles are necessarily linked, for queer people, Palestinians, and those who are both.
The monetary flows aimed at banning drag-sladen and laid-back discourse about Palestine come in large part from the same right-wing backers, led through evangelical Christian Zionists and the Israel lobby.
For example, among the keynote speakers at the November 14 March for Israel in Washington, D. C. there was televangelist John Hagee, founder and president of the Christian Zionist organization Christians United for Israel, who once preached that Hurricane Katrina would be God’s punishment for homosexuality. In his sermon, he declared that the Antichrist would reveal himself as a gay, “mixed-race” Jew.
The monetary flows aimed at banning drag-sladen and laid-back discourse about Palestine come in large part from the same right-wing backers, led through evangelical Christian Zionists and the Israel lobby.
On the same level was the impression of the current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, whose recent crusade has garnered more donations from the pro-Israel lobby than from any other industry. Flanked by Israeli officials, Johnson addressed tens of thousands of attendees. on the National Mall, saying that “calls for a ceasefire are outrageous. “
Johnson spent eight years as a spokesperson and attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly the Alliance Defending Fund), which leverages the U. S. judicial and electoral systems to break down barriers between church and state. The Alliance has called for the incarceration of LGBTQ people and provides lawyers and style language for many of the anti-LGBTQ spending that has been crowding the offices of state legislatures lately.
Johnson’s first act as House leader was to pass a solution that he won almost unanimously in Congress, affirming America’s special relationship with Israel, which he followed up with a move to announce a $14 billion aid package for the apartheid state. That money will be reinvested in his next campaign.
Nicki Jizz hosts a popular monthly party called Reparations at Oasis, a club in San Francisco’s South Market neighborhood. The area was once a bathhouse and is owned by another staple of San Francisco’s drag scene, D’Arcy Drollinger.
Jizz streamed his first quarantine online in 2020, when all drag venues in the city were closed. Four years later, some of the long-standing gay bars and clubs are no longer with us, but Reparations lives on, with a “come “Everybody, come everybody” (tickets are loose if you’re BIPOC, trans, or disabled) centering the venue. queens instead of “Drag Race”-related names. She spoke with Truthout on Zoom on March 5, the day of the premiere of a TV show in which she co-stars. Its name is a reading of the existing ubiquity of drag pageants in pop culture: “Drag Queen Pageant of the Year Contest Awards Contest. “
Jizz hosted February’s festival at the SF Museum of Modern Art, which featured Ganuush and King Lotus Boy. He cited the night as an example of how “every drag performance is a moment to express your heart, mind, and emotions on a people’s level. “It makes sense that much of the drag incorporates a nod to existing cultural occasions and phenomena that fear the performers and the audience they’re speaking to, whether on the level or on social media. She encourages Reparations artists to use the level to make explicit the perspectives they desire, saying “I’ve noticed a lot of political numbers right now. I’ll take more,” then pauses for a few seconds and reconsiders. Well, if someone were to put a number on veganism. . . I’m done with that. ” (We laugh when I mention I’m vegan. )
Zionist politicians, the media that backs them, and nonprofits like the UNHRC are competing to distract us from Israel’s excessive violence, with the U. S. as complicit.
However, her gaslighting techniques haven’t fully permeated drag culture, and Jizz is one of the queens trying to keep it that way. Right now, “we see a lot of other people who are afraid to say out loud” her position “because they don’t need to lose this or that. ” But the truth is, “other people are wasting their lives. So what’s more important?”
Toshio Meronek is the co-author of Miss Major Speaks and host of the podcast Sad Francisco; They have reported on housing and queer politics for Truthout since 2013.